Drama · Essays · Writers & Critics
Lincoln (2012) & Wolf Hall (2015)/Les Miserables (1933) & Great Expectations (1946/2012) * * * So, notwithstanding humanist art or realistic biography, we go on hurting each other. “Everybody hurts,” as[…]
DVD & Blu-ray · Essays · Historical & Epic · Writers & Critics
He was the spectator at his own drama, like a person at a play he doesn’t understand. – Victor Hugo1 “On the other hand, I don’t want to do Petronius[…]
Books · Directors · Interviews · Writers & Critics
I could begin to see how the movie was art imitating life and then morphed into life imitating art, with such a palpable sense of the greatest director who ever lived[…]
Mesmerizing designs pull our eyes away from the tiresome demands of history, but Bonello doesn’t portray Yves as an escapist. Instead, he suggests that we cannot assume a straightforward relation[…]
Directors · Interviews · Middle East
I have made films both in Iran and France, so I know the conditions. In France, when funding is given, there are no strings attached to it. You are free[…]
Historical & Epic · Producers & Studios · War
Introduction Hell’s Angels, Howard Hughes’s 1930 film, was praised for its aerial photography and derided for its story. “War Brings Out What People Really Are” surveys critical films Hollywood produced[…]
Activist & Political · Directors · Interviews
Hope is the title, half ironic, half resolutely sincere, of a stunning film about African migrants trekking across a continent’s most forbidding landscapes to reach the promised land of Europe.[…]
Suddenly the whole medium grew up before my eyes . . . a grown-up film, with people behaving as they do in real life . . . . Nobody had ever[…]
Directors · Documentaries · Experimental & Underground · War
Despite the reputation that Alain Resnais has garnered as “cinema’s definitive artist of postwar trauma,” few scholars have undertaken a detailed comparative analysis of his two works that broach this[…]
Directors · Production History
Part I of this article told the story of how Orson Welles, while directing his legendary and never-finished Other Side of the Wind, took time out in early 1975 to[…]
Directors · Production History
2015 marks the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Orson Welles. Despite numerous biographies and critical studies, we are still piecing together the full story of his wild and complicated[…]
Activist & Political · Actors & Personalities · War
Angelina Jolie may be among our best hopes to end the cruel and vile practice of mass rape in conflict. She has a bully pulpit as a rich and famous[…]
First daring and experimental in an era of conformity, then classical in the age of the new wave, and finally nuanced and introspective when fashionable tastes ran radical and revolutionary[…]
A self-confessed conjurer, Bergman’s films are tricky in every sense. What makes these movies so difficult is what makes life itself difficult – the overwhelming desire to know the unknowable,[…]
My characters try to do the right things, but their feelings, their desires drag them somewhere else, so that they have to “negotiate” with themselves. And that interests me because[…]
Directors · Drama · Reviews · Writers & Critics
That Anderson chose to adhere so closely to the novel indicates a lack of desire to transform or elevate the work, and, regardless of whether or not this was motivated[…]
Essays · New Media · SF & Fantasy · Writers & Critics
“What Jonze, Coover, and Švankmajer are all playing with in their distinctive, varying shades of dark humor are the dual perspectives of the Spielbergian audience, absorbed in the protagonists’ fantasies,[…]
Introduction This essay uses The Crow, Dark City, and Knowing to trace director Alex Proyas’ repeated thinking through of a philosophical problem using a stock of images that derives from[…]
Directors · Film Technology & History · Historical & Epic · Pre-Code · Religion & Spirituality · Silents
This post was adapted from the new book by Cecilia de Mille Presley and Mark A. Vieira, Cecil B. DeMille: The Art of the Hollywood Epic (Running Press, 416pp, December[…]
Activist & Political · African American · Directors · Reviews
“Do the Right Thing ends the morning after Radio Raheem’s death, but we have enough details to know how the rest of the narrative will play out. Radio Raheem was[…]
